UNDERGROUND
Pad had already braced himself for the possibility of prison. His lawyer warned him before the sentencing date that there was a reasonable likelihood the two 8lgm hackers would be sent down. After the Wandii case, the public pressure to ‘correct’ a ‘wrong’ decision by the Wandii jury was enormous. The police had described Wandii’s acquittal as ‘a licence to hack’ — and *The Times*, had run the statement.11 It was likely the judge, who had presided over Wandii’s trial, would want to send a loud and clear message to the hacking community.
Pad thought that perhaps, if he and Gandalf had pleaded not guilty alongside Wandii, they would have been acquitted. But there was no way Pad would have subjected himself to the kind of public humiliation Wandii went through during the ‘addicted to computers’ evidence. The media appeared to want to paint the three hackers as pallid, scrawny, socially inept, geeky geniuses, and to a large degree Wandii’s lawyers had worked off this desire. Pad didn’t mind being viewed as highly intelligent, but he wasn’t a geek. He had a casual girlfriend. He went out dancing with friends or to hear bands in Manchester’s thriving alternative music scene. He worked out his upper body with weights at home. Shy – yes. A geek – no.
Could Pad have made a case for being addicted to hacking? Yes, although he never believed that he had been. Com- pletely enthralled, entirely entranced? Maybe. Suffering from a passing obsession? Perhaps. But addicted? No, he didn’t think so. Besides, who knew for sure if a defence of addiction could have saved him from the prosecution’s claim anyway?
Exactly where the quarter of a million pound claim came from in the first place was a mystery to Pad. The police had just said it to him, as if it was fact, in the police interview. Pad hadn’t seen any proof, but that hadn’t stopped him from spending a great deal of time feeling very stressed about how the judge would view the matter.
The only answer seemed to be some good, independent tech- nical advice. At the request of both Pad and Gandalf’s lawyers, Dr Peter Mills, of Manchester University, and Dr Russell Lloyd,